In May 1995, my wife and I bought a run-down 150-year-old house on Martha’s Vineyard, a small island off the coast of Massachusetts with a winter population of roughly 12,000 and a summer population of over 100,000.

Our plan was to live year-round in this somewhat isolated but romantic location. We weren’t worried: we would have a 56 kbps connection to the Internet as our main link to the outside world. But when we found out that the cost of our Internet hookup would be roughly $400 a month, we decided to start an Internet cooperative to help pay for it.

We figured we could get together eight people and have them each pay $50/month for a full-time connection. Of course, eight full-time connections meant that we also needed to have some number of dialup lines, increasing our monthly charges by roughly $30 per line. (How many dialup lines did we need? Two? Eight? We didn’t know.) Perhaps a better alternative, we realized, would be to get a few dozen people together and charge them each $30/month. As it was unlikely that all of those people would want to go online at the same time, we could probably get away with having only 1 modem for every 5 customers, or perhaps 1 modem for every 10. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations said that we should break even when we got to 30 customers.

As it turned out, we didn’t break even until we got to 400 customers, and we couldn’t pay our employees a living wage until we hit more than 1000.

This is the story of Vineyard.NET, the Internet service that we created. It’s printed here so that others might learn from our experience.